The entry says that the station in the middle of Greenland was placed where the motor sledges could reach it and that the motor sledges could not. This piece goes through the record of the machines: what they were, what Wegener wrote about them day by day in the week that decided the autumn of 1930, what the engineer who drove them said in their defence, and what became of them.

What they were

The two sledges were built in Finland by the state aircraft factory, which made such machines for the sea ice of the Gulf of Bothnia and altered the design for snow at Wegener’s order. Anker Weidick, who traced them for the Danish Technical Museum in 1974, gives the dimensions: about six metres long and two wide, a plywood cabin for two on a steel frame, a Siemens Sh-12 engine at the back developing 112 horsepower and driving a propeller, and a weight without the engine of 250 kilograms. They were taken up the Kamarujuk glacier in pieces, engines, hulls and fuel, to the edge of the ice at Scheideck, 972 metres above the fjord, and put together there by the engineer Curt Schif and the mechanics Franz Kelbl and Manfred Kraus. On 2 September 1930, Wegener’s diary records, “Kraus and Kelbl are painting the names on the sledges”: Schneespatz, “Snow Sparrow”, and Eisbär, “Polar Bear”. The plan was that they would carry the house, the paraffin and the instruments for the middle station 400 kilometres in, over the ground that dog sledges took three weeks to cover, and come back in a day or two.

The week of 2 to 8 September

Wegener’s diary of the summer of 1930 survives to 10 September; the volume he kept after that was lost with Rasmus Villumsen. The September pages, in the Deutsches Museum at Munich, were scanned and transcribed by the Rachel Carson Center in 2013, and what follows is my translation of them.

On the morning of 2 September there had been new snow in the night. “The whole ice sheet is now everywhere covered with about 20 centimetres of fairly loose new snow, into which one sinks some 10 centimetres, and on top of that lies another centimetre of quite fine loose snow.” They meant to try an empty sledge on the marked route “to see whether the sledges can run on this track at all. We all very much fear that it will not work, and then the situation is really unpleasant. These masses of soft new snow here in the region where the slope is still steep are a nasty trick that nature is playing on us! Oh yes, eight days earlier and everything would have gone smoothly.” Then the sentence that opens the entry: “The introduction of propeller sledges into polar research is really a hard birth. And one thing is certain: my expectations will come closer to the facts than Schif’s. There will be nothing of the roaring drive and the unlimited possibilities, and we must be glad if we succeed at all in getting everything necessary 400 kilometres in.” That afternoon all four of them took Schneespatz out empty and it “went better than expected in the soft new snow”. They found two depots, marked the route home with black flags and empty petrol cans, jumping off without stopping, and made 43 kilometres by the odometer, at 35 kilometres an hour downhill. “It was a glorious pleasure drive. … What a pity that we cannot yet drive with a load today, for it would surely go tolerably well.” By evening the wind had grown to a storm.

On 3 September the storm was still blowing, with drift “filling the air up to 1.5 metres”, and the worry had moved from the machines to the station. “Supplying Georgi’s station is getting harder and harder. If from now on autumn weather with strong wind prevails, everything goes even more slowly, and it is doubtful whether the Greenlanders will not then fail. And there is still a desperate amount of material lying here and at the next depot. If only Georgi and Sorge had taken fewer instruments and more food and their house! I fear it will take its revenge that I left the matter to Georgi, at his urging. And Sorge with his boundless optimism is no good complement either! Georgi will now probably gradually be getting afraid that the thing is going wrong, and not entirely without reason. Heavens, why must we have unbroken bad luck with the weather now!”

On 4 September they tried to drive. “It took us two and a half hours to get the sledges free!” Schneespatz had stood a day and shook loose easily enough; Eisbär’s runners had frozen to the ground under a crust of ice and had to be levered up one after the other and chipped clean. The temperature was hovering around zero, so that drift melted on the sledges in the sun and froze in the shade, and “the machines are being terribly mistreated by this icing”. Getting aboard meant jumping into a moving sledge, “always a slightly ticklish undertaking, for if one misses one’s grip or one’s footing one can go into the propeller”. They drove into the storm. On the lee side of the rise beyond the lake plateau, where the slope was steepest and the wind and drift strongest, “Schneespatz, driving exactly against the wind, came to a standstill, although full throttle was given”. Three men worked for half an hour to free it, levering it round through 90 degrees so that it took the wind on its side, “all three of us outside, while full throttle was given!, until it got going, and only then did the driver jump in. At home this method would be quite impossible! But what is one to do?” Both machines then tried to tack up the slope. Neither could. Against the wind they made about fifteen kilometres an hour, with it fifty; the wind itself was sixty, by Schif’s anemometer and by Holzapfel’s at Scheideck. They came back to the tents “with the whole baggage, without having achieved anything. That was pretty depressing.”

That evening he set out what the machines were worth. “Yes, the possibilities of the propeller sledges are turning out to be considerably more limited than our optimists had assumed. Uphill, even in favourable weather and on a favourable track, we make only 20 to 30 kilometres an hour, and days with a strong headwind are lost altogether, as are days with or after new snow, because of the track. One can only work rationally with the propeller sledges when both track and wind are favourable.” One such day had already been lost because the markers were missing. Then the arithmetic the entry quotes, the 4,000 kilograms lying at the edge and at 25 kilometres, the 2,700 already in, the 2,500 that still had to go, and the minimum programme of one more dog journey and two machine trips of a thousand kilograms each. And the engines: “Our engines now have 100 horsepower against 150 in the Finnish ones. And at that our sledges are bigger and heavier, and they are meant to carry loads, not people. I am almost afraid it was a colossal mistake of Hansen’s to think it would be enough all the same. Yes, it is just about enough, but we don’t get enough speed! … And our engines unfortunately keep running hot, especially whenever we make only slow progress at full throttle. Perhaps that too will get better in the cold, but it shows that too much is being asked of the engines. We needed not weaker but stronger engines than in Finland. But those, of course, we would not have got for nothing. The whole outfit shows that great performance was expected of the engines, or rather that the work to be done is greater than was estimated. On top of that there are the trailers! We cannot even fill the sledges themselves!” Who Hansen was the diary does not say; the entry takes him for the man who had advised that the smaller engines would do.

On 5 September, “the propeller sledges were tried in earnest. The result is not very encouraging.” There was a strong headwind, “which must be taken as normal for September”, and every visible rise had to be taken by tacking, “the surest proof that we would have needed stronger engines. Presumably the Finnish ones of 170 horsepower would have been right, or perhaps 200, because we have bigger loads. Hansen made an error of calculation there.” Schneespatz stalled facing uphill, had to be unloaded, dug out to the ice and turned nose-down to be started empty, and broke a bolt in its front axle in the process. From fifty kilometres on the slope eased, “and they breathed again”. They drove until the tanks ran dry, which could be felt at the petrol pump, at a snow cairn beyond the 80-kilometre marker, unloaded, put three cans of petrol into each sledge, found Eisbär’s oil tank cracked and bound it with cord, and came home in the dark, down the wrong side of the lake plateau at a speed the drivers could not hold, over four snow-bridged crevasses in which “we saw black holes in the track of the sledge ahead”. “We breathed again when we came out on to the soft snow surface again. It could easily have gone wrong.” The whole drive had been 189 kilometres, “without doubt the greatest performance ever yet achieved with motor sledges at all”.

On the morning of 6 September he worked out the speeds, seventeen kilometres an hour outward above the tacking, twenty-four home, and reduced the programme: a single loaded run to 400 in four stages, with depots at 50, 160 and 280 kilometres, four trips to the first, three to the second, two to the third, one to the end. “Reaching 400 kilometres with a payload demands from the propeller sledges altogether 1,880 kilometres of driving, even now!” Then: “What now? Now the catastrophe is here. It is impossible to equip the central firn station in the way intended.” The machines would make their one trip, “which will last until the beginning, perhaps the middle, of October and be a gigantic labour for those involved. Whether Schif can still take part in the final run to 400 kilometres is very doubtful.” Because they might break down on a journey so far beyond their range, “they must not transport what is absolutely necessary, but only the less important”. The necessary things would go by dogs, and he would probably have to go with them. “The situation in which the expedition finds itself as a result of this failure of the motor sledges is simply unbearable.” And then, in the same entry, the other side: “By the way, it was wonderful yesterday, sitting in the comfortable driver’s seat, smoking a pipe, to skim across the drifting white desert. Especially the drive home against the coloured evening sky was an unheard-of pleasure! Yes, there is no doubt that the propeller sledges are the right mechanical means of transport on the inland ice. … But their range is only half as great as calculated, and therefore Georgi lies far too far off for them. If he were at 200 kilometres things would be quite different.”

On 7 September they carried the payload, “house and paraffin”, fifty kilometres in, with three cans of petrol each on top, and it worked. “Yes, the propeller sledges conquer the white desert! One must only not ask more of them than they can do: speeds above 30 kilometres an hour can be reached only quite exceptionally on an especially level track, quite simply because it jolts too much.” On 8 September, at Kamarujuk, he was “still quite carried away” by the run home at seventy kilometres an hour where the track was smooth. That day he typed the communiqué that the German papers printed on 27 September under the headline “At 70 kilometres an hour into the white desert”, which said that each sledge had carried 500 kilograms, that they had been three times to 90 kilometres, that the starting of the sledges was “a peculiar and unforeseen difficulty, since the runners freeze fast”, and that “all participants are enthusiastic about the wonderful impressions of the drive”. The diary and the communiqué are both true, and only one of them was printed.

The engineer’s defence

What the sledges did after Wegener left on 21 September is known from Schif, who came home in December and was interviewed in Copenhagen. They made their one loaded run to the 200-kilometre depot, where “we got completely stuck in the snow, and only after eight days of heavy labour did we succeed in getting the sledges free again, in which I learned for the first time what it means to live on emergency rations in the polar region and have to do hard work. In the snowstorm we had great trouble pitching camp; five of us had to crouch in a small two-man tent.” The same storm, at 28 degrees of frost, threw the new snow on to the track that stopped Wegener’s dogs. On the way back Schif met the dog column 43 kilometres from the West Station, having had to stop for the night with engine trouble, and camped three kilometres from it; Wegener, he said, was pleased to have got so many Greenlanders to go, and “was thoroughly confident”.

Asked whether the machines could not help in the winter, Schif said that they were “naturally less suited to winter journeys in themselves. They were intended in the first place for freight transport in summer. All the same, we have completely overcome the difficulties of the cold. Even at 60 degrees of frost we could get the engines to start. The greatest obstacle, however, is the bad sledge track, especially now, when deep new snow is constantly to be expected, in which the motor sledges make no headway. Whenever the track is good, the motor sledges can of course be used at any time, even in winter, and with their great speed, they cover the average daily distance of a dog sledge in an hour, would achieve far more than a column of dog sledges.” He said that the machines’ work “entirely met the expectations placed on them. The baggage transport on the inland ice would not have been possible without their help.” And: “With the use of motor sledges on Arctic ice surfaces a whole new epoch of research has begun.” Peter Freuchen, the Danish explorer who had visited the expedition in the summer, called it the best equipped he had ever seen, and neither he nor the director of the Greenland administration thought in December that any relief measures were needed.

May

They were right about the track. On 7 May 1931, on the hard snow of spring, Kelbl and Kraus drove the two sledges the whole 400 kilometres to Eismitte, and Sorge, watching two black dots come up over the western horizon, wrote that “we had not expected such an unheard-of driving performance from the propeller sledges”. They had beaten the dog sledges that started with them by a few hours. Loewe, who could not walk, was taken out to the coast in one of them in two days. In December 1931 the journal Polarforschung, summing up the expedition on its return, put first among its practical results that “the first practical success in the use of motor sledges in the polar regions has been achieved”. Wegener’s own summing-up, in the diary of 6 September, had been that the machines were right and the distance wrong.

Where they ended

The engines went home to Germany in the autumn of 1931. The sledges were left on the rock at Scheideck, at the edge of the ice, and stayed there. A Danish geologist photographed them in 1934. In 1965 a visitor found them where they had been left, and found that one of them, set down in 1931 on a slab of rock level with the ice, now stood six metres above the ice surface: the glacier had thinned by that much in thirty-four years, which Loewe, who came back to look in 1967, published as a measurement. In the autumn of 1973 volunteers from the lead and zinc mine that had opened nearby brought the remains down to the harbour, and they reached Copenhagen in November for the Danish Technical Museum at Elsinore. Schif, then in his seventies, supplied the museum with the technical drawings. Only one of the two was in a condition to be rebuilt.

Sources

• Alfred Wegener, Tagebücher, April to September 1930, Deutsches Museum Archiv, Munich, NL 001/014, pages 128 to 158, as scanned and transcribed by the Rachel Carson Center’s exhibition The Wegener Diaries, 2013. All diary passages are my own translation from the German transcript. environmentandsociety.org, transcript PDF
• Alfred Wegener, radio telegram “Mit 70 Stundenkilometern in die weiße Wüste”, Hallische Nachrichten, 27 September 1930, p. 3. My translation. Deutsches Zeitungsportal
• Curt Schif, interviewed in Copenhagen, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15 December 1930, p. 13: the 200-kilometre run, the eight days, the meeting with the column, and the defence of the machines. My translation. Deutsches Zeitungsportal
• Ernst Sorge, “Wie wir Wegener fanden”, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 19 August 1931, p. 3: the arrival of the sledges on 7 May 1931. My translation. Deutsches Zeitungsportal
• Max Grotewahl, “Wegener-Expedition zurück”, Polarforschung 1 (2), 31 December 1931, p. 5. My translation. epic.awi.de
• Anker Weidick, “Final destination of ‘Schneespatz’ and ‘Eisbär’, the propeller sledges of Wegener’s last Greenland expedition”, Polarforschung 44 (1), 1974, pp. 89–91: the builder, the dimensions, the engine, the photographs of 1934, the finding of 1965, Loewe’s measurement of 1967 and the salvage of 1973; it cites Schif’s own chapters in Else Wegener’s book of 1932 and in the first volume of the scientific results, 1933, which could not be reached. epic.awi.de